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Source: Steve B. Pleasanton ,CA – BOX OF CHOCOLATES – 2026-08-27.m4a File: steve-b-pleasanton-ca-box-of-chocolates-2026-08-27.mp3 Duration: 00:47:12
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Thank you, Ramona. What a nice intro. You may change your mind before the end of the meeting, but my name is Steve. I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is 1-1-91, and I've been active in AA the entire time, and that has to do with good sponsorship and trying to take a little direction. So I have a home group. I have commitments. I have, yeah, I have a lot of guys that I work with, and it's really a blessing to me. AA has enriched my life immeasurably.
So anyway, when I was a kid, I'm just going to tell my story because I don't know what else to do, but when I was a kid, I was pretty comfortable up until the time I was about eight or nine or ten years old, and it used to be, you know, we lived on a ranch in Idaho, and it was BB guns and laying on the front lawn watching the clouds go over and seeing faces in the clouds. I remember that and talking about it, pointing them out, and my cousins and I, our whole gun safety lesson from my uncle was, don't shoot your cousin, and that was it.
So we didn't, well, we kind of did. In fact, we got caught at it, and so he gave us safety glasses, and he says, if I see you guys not wearing these safety glasses, I'm going to take your BB guns away. So that was the kind of era and time I grew up in. Around ten or eleven years old, I started feeling a little more uncomfortable, and the world started to get gray and to become a little more threatening, and I think that that led to, well, I ultimately think it led to my drinking, but I was uncomfortable in my skin after that, and I hadn't been before then, so it came on gradually, and, you know, the rest is history. So I was about 13 years old, and we were going to a junior high school dance. We'd moved to California, which I didn't want to come to.
I had my dog in the woods and the creeks and the meadows, and I certainly didn't want to move to California, but we did, and I went to a parochial school here, and they would beat you into an education, if nothing else, and you learned some respect for the clerics that were there. I was an altar boy. I was going to a retreat up here one time, and there were six of us in the suburban going down to a retreat, and five of us had been altar boys, so I don't know what they were doing, but they were churning out the drunk. So anyway, so we stole some beer from my friend's father's garage, and we went to this junior high dance, and I remember what it was. It was Colt 45 Stout Malt Liquor Talls, and they had, I drank about, I don't know, over the course of the night, I probably drank about four or five of them, and it changed my, it changed the way I looked at the world. It wasn't just that I felt better. It was that suddenly things were in color again, and that was an amazing experience, and I think when booze affects you that way, you tend to want to repeat that experience. Now, it's not easy when you're 13 years old, 14 years old, so we would shoulder tap and steal booze and do whatever we could, water the parents down and all the stuff that we all did, and so I tried to drink as often as I could. I say that I drank through the four phases of drinking, and I think it was that way.
When I was a teenager, it was wine and beer in the park with the girls, and I was, quote,
[00:05:09]
partying with the guys, and I could, I could, I noticed I could out drink almost anybody else, or not everybody, but most everyone else. I seemed to have, right from the beginning, a pretty high tolerance, so that night at the junior high school dance, I was able to dance with a girl that I hadn't met. I got in a fight defending her honor against a guy that was older than me. I lost that fight. We kind of tore the place up a bit after that, got chased by the police, and I remember the floodlights sweeping across the grass where we were hiding, and I wasn't even afraid. I thought, you can't catch me, you old guy. There's no way, and so all kinds of things in my personality changed, so I went home. I got horribly ill, and I stayed out until two o'clock in the morning or something, and I went home, and I got terribly sick, and I woke up the next morning, and I thought, I want to do that every day for the rest of my life, and I want to repeat that experience, and that probably should have been a clue to what was to come, but anyway, I don't know if anybody here, so I met and married a girl. I went to an experimental school, and they did behavior studies on us, and we had to do the influx and all that kind of stuff, and they concluded on about a dozen of us, and they concluded that we were gifted children with authority problems, which seems like an oxymoron. I mean, why bother, but all of us seem to have the same characteristic, and interestingly enough today, of those 12 people, I'm the only one that's still alive that I know of. The last one died about five years ago, drank himself to death in New Jersey, and so what they had done is they identified the pre-alcoholics or the beginning alcoholics, I think, so anyway, I always liked to work. I always wanted to work because I wanted the money. When I was a kid, we used to bale hay and work around the ranch and get paid for it.
We had chores to do, and we did those without getting paid and without arguing, and it was just an era. You could get smacked on the head and say, respect your elders if you got mouthy, and so we learned a bit about respect, and it was a different era, so I met a woman when I was about 17 years old, I met a woman that I'm married to today. We dated for a couple years. We've been married 55 years, I think, and she's an amazing woman. I drank for effect forever. She's never drank for effect, and it seems to come down to the fact that she doesn't need to change the way she feels. She doesn't want to change the way she feels. She feels fine. She's optimistic. She's hopeful. She's positive. She has a smile on her face all the time, and I don't get that, and I've never understood it, but she put up with me, and she has for a long time.
A while back, I said, it's better now, isn't it? It's much better now, and she said, yes, Stephen, it's better, and that's about as much as I get, and hopefully, it's better, so anyway, I kept drinking, but I went to work, and work was always very important to me, and I started a small contracting business in the Bay Area here, and I worked obsessively. A couple of kids come along. I don't know if there's anybody here that's obsessive either.
[00:10:04]
I don't get a good idea. I get missile block, and it's still that way. If I see something that I feel needs to get done, I will exclude everything else and go straight for that, and I have to be reminded quite often, slow down there, cowboy. You've got other things to do, and this will get done in good time, and anyway, so we got married in 1972, I think, and a couple of kids came along, and by that point, I was working obsessively. I was drinking when I could, and which was mostly weekends, and I hadn't graduated to the next stage yet, and I was really nervous about, well, I was really nervous about getting married to start with.
She had three sisters, and then she said after two years together, she said, Stephen, I need a commitment, and I knew what that meant, and my romantic proposal was, okay, and then the wedding machine went into gear, and the next thing I know, we were married, so a couple of kids come along. We have a daughter and a son, and the son came first, and then the daughter, and I wasn't the kind of parent that beat my kids or yelled at anybody, or I was just kind of moody and unpredictable, I think, and it had to do with concern about work.
It had to do with concern about myself, about self-centeredness. It had to do with my obsessive nature, and so I just did the best I could, given the conditions that I was working under, and I never broke glass. I never screamed at the kids. I never hit them or did anything like that. I always loved my kids, and I tried to do the best I could, but I was gone all the time. I was working every day all the time, six days a week, seven days a week, and my wife, so fortunately for my kids and for me, my wife did most of the child-rearing, and they turned out okay. Neither one of them has substance problems, and they both don't need to change the way they feel.
They seem to be able to live in this world reasonably comfortably, so as time went on, the drinking progressed, and I started drinking at bars, because when I was a kid, they told me we had a lot of potential, and I don't know if anybody's ever heard that, but you have such potential, and so I started going to the bar at 10 o'clock in the morning on the way after opening the shop and went to the bar. There was a bartender there that I loved, because he never asked you what you wanted. He just started pouring triples. He put 20 bucks on the counter, and he would pour triples until the money was gone, and then he'd come back and tap the counter again, and he'd put more money on it, so I was realizing my potential at 10 a.m.
in the bar. I like bars that have no windows, dark, smoky places. I love the smell of bars and stale tobacco and old booze, and so I drank there as long as I could until I couldn't get served quick enough. As my old mentor Clancy said, he said, I was thoughtlessly underserved, and that's kind of the way I felt. So, so, excuse me. That was about, I was probably about 28, 29 years old. We bought a house.
I found out that if you work obsessively, you can get a house in the suburbs and some toys and things. I've always tried to be a good provider for the family, and that's
[00:15:01]
to me because I didn't have that when I was a kid. My dad died when I was two and my mother was an alcoholic although like me she always showed up for the bell every day. You have to go to work every day no matter what, and her and I kind of drifted apart and I was a latchkey kid by the time I was 14 years old. So anyway, at this point I'm working obsessively, my kids are being raised by their mother.
She had a big family and they were at our house all the time and her mother used to come by like three times a day and I love my mother-in-law, but three times a day was a little much. So I was fortunate to have that family support, we never used child care, we always had family members taking care of the kids. And the drinking continued to progress. We used to go fishing a lot on the west coast here, up and down the west coast, and I went to Mexico one time and I had a horrible hangover the night before, it was just me and four other guys, five other guys.
I had a horrible hangover the next morning and we woke up early to go fishing and my friend said, what this calls for is a pitcher of margaritas. So I drank the morning drink for the first time, which was really pretty incredible. I felt better instantly and I never stopped the morning drink again for the next 15 years. And so I'd wake up, now I'm into stage four alcoholism, the beginning of stage four alcoholism.
I had a friend say that he thinks he crossed the line when he started lying about his drinking. And I had crossed that line long before. And so, so I, I finally found out how I like to drink, which is vodka in a bottle in a paper bag, out from underneath the seat of my pickup truck by myself. And that's, that's, that's my preferred method of drinking. I couldn't always drink that way, but quite often I could.
So things are going on, the business is growing, the kids are growing up and my drinking is getting worse and worse and worse. And then the last five years, between the ages of maybe 32 and 38, I was drink to die drinking. I would stay drunk as long as I could, which was two or three weeks, and then I'd stay sober as long as I could, which was three or four days. And then we'd start that cycle over again.
And now, now the real consequences of drinking are starting to stack up. I'm getting seizures, I'm getting DTs, we don't talk about DTs much, but I would hear music and voices and see things out of the corner of my eye. And then I had a massive, third time I had a seizure, I had a massive grand mal seizure in the foyer of our office. And it's, and I'm flopping around on the floor like a fish, which is distressing to the staff.
And they seem to get upset about things like that. My partner picked me up and threw me in a pickup, we drove up to a hospital really fast, it was close by. He carried me in, and I could feel the lights going out. I knew my vision was starting to fade. I could hear things, but my vision was starting to fade, and I knew I was dying. And I thought, I thought, everything's okay, she'd be better off without me.
The insurance is paid, the business can, my partner can run the business. And it's fine, because it's not the dying that scares me, it's the living that scares me. And, and I couldn't live in this world without Boo, I never, I never had since I could remember.
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it. So, you know, you've made some bad life decisions when one of three things happen. I found out all three, one, there's no handle on your side of the door. That's not a good thing. The second is rubber socks with bumpers on the bottom. That's another not a good thing. And the third, and most memorable one for me, is when with the lights fading, and my vision going, I hear clear, that's a bad sign.
And so they took the electric paddles, and they jumpstarted me, and my heart had stopped. And I came back to, and I thought, and I looked across the room, and I could see my partner was standing in the corner, and he was crying, and he was a big man, a big, tough guy. And I thought, I've really crossed the line, I've taken it too far, I need to do something about this. I would, I would stop drinking fairly soon after that, because my wife said, you don't live in here, you're not living here anymore, cowboy.
Your stuff's on the front porch. I'm going to take you for every nickel you got, and you're never going to see your kids again. Sayonara. She'd been going to Al-Anon, I didn't know that. I had seen a couple of the brochures around the house, but it was kind of a funny word, and I never, I never knew what it meant. And she said that she learned in Al-Anon that she had to protect herself and the children from me, and whatever that took.
So I said, all right, all right, you call AA. And she says, you call AA. And so, so I went into rehab, and I got A's in rehab, because all you have to do is repeat back what they say to you, and they think you're getting it. But I do remember one thing they said in there, very distinctly, they said, you're only as sick as your secrets. And I knew when they said that, I had a lot of secrets, I'd crossed every line, I'd broken every rule, I'd broken every trust, I'd hurt all the people around me.
And I'm grinding the love out of all the people that are trying to help me. I had met along the way a guy in our industry who was, he was a sales rep. This is in the days before phones and faxes, or before cell phones. And he'd come into the shop, and he'd use his, he'd use our phones and fax machines. And he'd been sober a long time, and I kind of, I don't know how I learned that, but I kind of got the drift that he'd been sober a while.
And I noticed how he worked, which was, he just, he didn't try to get the last dollar out of you, he just tried to help people sort out problems that they had, and get things done for people. And he was a very kind man, and he was a very good man. And the day that I got out of rehab, I had never been to an AAV, he said, I knew I needed you to sponsor, because they said that. And I said, will you sponsor me?
Which was a weird thing, because I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know the definition of alcoholism, and I didn't know what a sponsor was. I thought that was the guy that was going to pay your way into the back room so you wouldn't have to wait in line or something, I don't know. And he said, are you willing to take a little direction? And I said yes. And I don't know why he said that, because guys like me never say yes to questions like that.
And I think that was one of the first times, I think all my life I've had spiritual experience, but I think that was one of the special times when God's finger came into my life. And I said yes. And he said, let's go to breakfast. And in the next two hours, he told me in unbelievable detail his whole story. He told me how he'd almost died in upstate New York in a snowbank from hypothermia, and he told me what it was like to be in jail, and I kind of had been in jail.
I hadn't been in jail seriously. And I said, well, Glenn, if I was dying of hypothermia in a snowbank, I'd quit drinking too. And he says, it doesn't snow here.
[00:25:00]
And he said, you just got out of an insane asylum, my friend. And they can call it first start, new beginnings, first step, new recovery. They can call it whatever they want, but it's a nuthouse, and you're not a visitor there. And he hurt my feelings, because he was right, and I knew it. And so he told me his story, and it was the first time in my life that anybody had ever been that honest with me.
And he was number one. He was the first guy that I've ever experienced that way, because I never thought that men talked like that. I never thought that anyone could be that honest. And he said, we're going to go to a meeting. It's at 8 o'clock tonight. I'll pick you up at 5. And I said, why are you picking me up at 5 if the meeting's not till 8? And he says, well, we got some work to do there. So we went there.
He's 24 years sober, and I'm helping him set up the chairs for a big meeting, 150 guys. And then we went to dinner, and he introduced me to all these guys that talked about themselves incessantly. But they were really friendly, and they were really nice to me. And they brought me into their life. They showed me how to live this program. They began to show me how to do that. We raised our kids together.
We did all kinds of things. In the foreword of the 12 and 12, there's a little 37-word passage that's maybe the clearest reading that I know of in all of our literature. And it says, AA's 12 steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which if practiced as a way of life, if practiced as a way of life, comma, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole.
And that's an amazing passage, because that's exactly what happened. He said, you know, you drank pretty hard, pretty bad. Your health was failing, is failing, and your business is failing, and your marriage is on life support. And we're going to start into the steps right away, because if we don't, I think you'll drink again. And so I said, OK, all right, once again, OK. And so I said, I don't get the first three steps.
And he said, that's OK. He said, you've got religious bias. You can't believe your life's unmanageable. You know you're powerless over alcohol, because you just got out of the nuthouse for drinking. And so you got the first part of the first step. You probably kind of, sort of, maybe believe that this can restore you to sanity. So you got a piece of the second step. And as far as your relationship with a power greater than yourself, we'll work on that.
So let's write an inventory. Let's get going. So he said, go out today and get a spiral notebook. I had a copy of the big book. And he said, he drew me a little diagram, four-column diagram. And he said, I want you to write the people you resent. And I said, I don't really resent anybody. I don't know. I don't quite know what that means. It's not something we talked about in the bars. And he said, who do you hate?
And I said, oh, OK, it was another one of those oh moments. So I started writing. And I tried to write down the resentments, the fears, and my conduct in relationships with the honesty that he had shared with me. I didn't get what the book said, because he said four columns, but the book's got three columns. And it said Mrs. Brown. And I don't know all that stuff. I don't know what they meant there.
But without his clarification, I probably never would have figured it out. The fourth column is on the next page and talks about that. So I went to write. He said, now, we can do this two ways. He says, you can take two months and two hours to write this inventory, or you can take two hours, or you can die between the time you do it now and the time you do it. So he said a lot of people do. He said, a lot of people do. And so I said, okay, once again. And so I, I started writing
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frantically. I didn't want to drink anymore. I knew it was wrecking my life. And we spent those early days talking about the definition of alcoholism. And we read several chapters on that. There's a whole, there's a whole bunch of it. Bill spends 50 pages at the beginning of the book and including, plus the doctor's opinion, explaining to boneheads like me what alcoholism is. And it's different. It's a spiritual problem. It's not a physical problem. Yes, I was addicted to alcohol, but in three or four days at the rehab, I shook it out. So they gave me something.
I don't know what it was, phenobarbital or something. I still felt terrible. So, so I started writing. I started reading. He said, can you pray? And I said, I don't know. He said, I want you to get on your knees in the morning. I want you to ask God to keep you sober. And at night, if you're still sober that night, I want you to get on your knees again at night and say, thank you. And that was my first prayer. And I said, well, I don't like all these. I've read the third step prayer, the seventh step prayer, all that. I don't like all the thee thy thous and all that stuff. That's not the way I want to pray. And he said, use your own words and pray the way you want to. And your concept of your higher power is whatever you want it to be. And we're not going to tell you anything about that. That's entirely up to you, which was kind of surprising to me because I thought it was, you know, you go into your first meeting, you see God, God, God, God, God, all the way through the steps and traditions. And that was that was kind of miserable. So I started praying the best I could.
And I stayed busy in AA. I got a million commitments because he made me. The one I dodged was GSR. And I'm very happy about that. He told me, you need a GSR commitment. And so I dodged around him until he forgot about it. And I never have been a GSR. And I'm very happy about that. So, but I have had a lot of positions. I've done intergroup and I've done a lot of stuff. I've done volunteer work at service centers. OK. So he said, I want you to take this commitment.
I said, what's a commitment? He said, it's it's a broken lung meeting at a at a homeless shelter in the middle of the industrial section of town. And it starts at 10 a.m. and you have to get a speaker every morning, five days a week, which is not easy to do. And so I went there. It was terrible. It was filthy. It was full of very strange people. And and we started getting speakers and that meeting started growing. And and it was amazing to me how often people would inconvenience themselves and come down at 10 o'clock in the morning because I was so nuts at 10 a.m. after being at work for a couple hours that I needed a meeting anyway. So I started doing that. The meeting started to grow. In fact, I met one of my business partners. It was his first. He was 17 years old and 18 years old. And it was his first day meeting. And he's hanging around in this homeless shelter and he's saying he looked really vulnerable and really afraid. So I went up to him after the meeting and I said, I want to take you to my home group. This is not that you can't come here if you want to, but I need to expose you to some strong meetings with a focused message.
And so he did that. And that was 35 years ago, 32 years ago. And him and I are business partners today. So he's younger than me. So. So my life started to heal. My my marriage started to heal. My kids responded well and fairly quickly. And he said, I want you to help your kids, help God's kids and help your own kids. I want you to act. I want you to start acting like a parent. And which is very inconvenient. And I said, OK, what do I do?
[00:35:07]
And he said, well, your daughter likes soccer. I want you to go to her soccer practices. Now, I hate soccer. We've never we've never I never even knew the rules to soccer. I was carrying a gun at 14 years old in Richmond and. There was no soccer guys there, I can tell you that. And and. And. And I went to 17,000,437,000 soccer games and the healing began. My son liked to play guitar and he wanted to start a rock group and which was also inconvenient.
And and they were terrible. They knew about three bars and they played them over and over and over again. But we had a place for them in the garage and. They and I, I went to my neighbor and I said they're going to make a lot of noise, and he said, that's not that's not noise, baby, that's the sound of living. And so I had a good neighbor that supported it. So they play these they play they play terribly over and over and over again. So. I got to be the roadie. I had a suburban at the time and I could load up all their speakers and guitars and stuff in the back. And they actually got gigs. They got to go places and play for people, which was embarrassing to me.
And their hair was long and they ate like locusts and they stunk up the whole kitchen and. It was ridiculous. And I did that for five years and the healing started. And my wife began to see that. My life was changing, my my view of the world was changing, I was changing. And she started to let me off the hook and it took a long time because I'd really hurt her and and. And a lot of the stuff I did, she's never mentioned again in all these years and and we live, we live really happily today. And she supports AA. I told her, I said, out of nowhere, I said, it's four o'clock meeting in Atlanta or somewhere.
Came to me today. I got to do that and I got to get dressed and I got to go to my home group tonight. And she said, that's fine. Go ahead and do it. So I get a lot of support and that's not always the case. A lot of a lot of spouses, a lot of people don't get the kind of support that I get, but maybe it's better. Maybe she knows that it helps. So so. Out of the rehab, I started getting sponsors and most of them were not. And after working the steps.
Quite a few of them stayed sober, some are still sober. And so I started working with guys taking taking commitment. And taking people through the book, the way it's written, I try not to make things up, I try not to embellish on things. And. I use the twelve and twelve too. We go through the we go through the book and then we go through the twelve and twelve and then we do the tradition. And and a lot of them are staying sober too.
Some of them have been sober a long time. So I'm very blessed to have those men in my life. I say it every day in my prayers every morning. Thank you for these men in my life. Thank you for these wonderful relationships you've given me. Thank you for my big, beautiful wife and my wonderful wife and family. And. So in the early years, I'll wrap this up pretty quick. In the early years. The busyness and the and kind of the glitter and the fellowship of AA was what I needed. And the step work allowed me to begin to forgive myself.
And it also, most importantly. Taught me how to try to not hurt other people. Because I really think that the last day of my drinking was less a physical symptom and more of a moral collapse. I couldn't stand what I had become and I can't live with that now. If I go back to that kind of living and that kind of thinking. I can't live with myself. So all of this stuff is about trying to make me be OK with who I am and. And mostly the day I don't hurt anybody anymore.
[00:40:06]
And most of the day I'm I'm at peace. So. I think that. I think if you're new here or feeling new here or feeling estranged or feeling stale, what I had to do is I had to change the program while keeping most of the same commitments. I started ramping up my prayer life because the underlying cause of this is it's it's it's a spiritual problem. And it requires spiritual growth. There's a story in our book about Jim in the milk. And he says and it says on the page before before he was putting whiskey in his milk.
It said he failed to enlarge his spiritual life. So I. I hit the wall at 17, 18 or 10 years sober. I hit it again at 18. And I went back to the book where my sponsor died, my dear sponsor, who was like a father to me, passed away in 06. And. I got another sponsor and he was a book guy in a in a in a writing assignment, guys. I wrote huge amount of things for him over the next 17 years that I stayed with him.
And then him and I decided that it was time to go different ways. He was going one way and I was trying to enlarge my spiritual life differently than he was. And so I changed sponsors about three years ago. And this guy is very kind and very subtle and very smart. And. And it's been a good thing. But now I get up at five o'clock in the morning. I go out in the other room. I write my prayers and I say them out loud. I listen for 10 minutes after I'm done. Because I get answers during that 10 minutes. And then I go out and I work out and I do my walk and I do my physical exercise. I eat well, I take care of myself. I don't smoke anymore. I don't. Most importantly, I don't I don't hurt people like I used to. So. I'm largely at peace. I've been retired for a few years and I have a lot of time. I spend a lot of time trying to work with drunks and do things in because. Because it's given me so much and I think I'd be I'd really be neglectful or remiss if I didn't. Sometimes, as an old friend of mine used to say, sometimes when you're looking at long term sobriety, what you've really seen is rigor mortis. And most of the time today, I think that if. If we're having problems. And we're at odds with ourself or our behavior starts to deteriorate or our character defects are starting to eat our life or whatever it is. A spiral notebook, big book in an hour and four hours in the backyard is responsive and you can get back on your spiritual legs. I'm absolutely convinced that because I've I've done it. And so it's coming up on five o'clock here, eight o'clock there, I guess, or seven o'clock there. And. And I just want to tell you guys. One of the things that I know. Most definitely. This program is old, ancient spiritual law. This isn't something that Bill invented in 35. These are things that have come down for centuries, and they'll put it together in a way that I can see it and I can hear it and I can listen to it. And you guys bring it to life and show me how to do it.
And I couldn't do it without you. I need your examples in my life. I need your. I need your help. And one of the most important things I ever learned here was simply to say, I'm crazy. I don't know what to do. Will you help me? And that's really. This is the only place I've ever found where that's possible. So good luck to all of you on your journeys. I love you guys. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Well, you never know what you're going to get.
You'll just have to. Well, you never know what you're gonna get. You'll just have to keep coming back. We surely hope to see you here next Thursday. Our special guest is dum-dum-dum! We don't know. Ramona. Ramona might know.
[00:45:04]
Um, you don't know yet? No. Oh, I'm sorry. I think. No. Wait a minute. Just a minute. I got it. Right here. It's right here. Francis from Lafayette, Louisiana. He snuck out of here. Hey, he's out. I'm out of here. Yep. If you like this meeting, please do as Bill Wilson always said. Pass it on. You can help others right from your phone or computer and tell them about this special meeting. Everyone is invited to hang out with us afterwards and the meeting after the meeting. The Porch. Steve, do you have any closing comments and would you please leave this out with a prayer or reading of your choice?
I guess my only closing comment is no matter how dark it can get at times, this thing truly works if we just keep going. Sometimes it seems like nothing's happening until everything changes. So, I love you guys and thank you. And I guess for a prayer, let's use a serenity prayer because it's simple and I can't remember the art father that to say upon myself. I'd forget it. I'd screw it up. Um, you ever tried to say it by yourself? It's really hard. Um, they screw it up on our meeting all the time. So, anyway, moment of silence and then the serenity prayer.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Thank you guys. All right, everyone can unmute and thank Steve. Thank you so much, Steve. Great share. Thank you, Steve. Amazing. Thank you for stepping up to with us and staying here with us. Thank you.